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1. On the Analysis of MUD-Files’ Interactions, Conflicts, and Configuration Requirements Before Deployment

   Andalibi, Vafa ; Lear, Eliot ; Dev, Jayati ; Kim, DongInn ; Camp, Jean ( January 2021 , SaSeIoT)

   null (Ed.)

   . Manufacturer Usage Description (MUD) is an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard designed to protect IoT devices and networks by creating an out-of-the-box access control list for an IoT device. Access control list of each device is defined in its MUD-File and may contain possibly hundreds of access control rules. As a result, reading and validating these files is a challenge; and determining how multiple IoT devices interact is difficult for the developer and infeasible for the consumer. To address this we introduce the MUD-Visualizer to provide a visualization of any number of MUD-Files. MUD-Visualizer is designed to enable developers to produce correct MUD-Files by providing format correction, integrating them with other MUD-Files, and identifying conflicts through visualization. MUD-Visualizer is scalable and its core task is to merge and illustrate ACEs for multiple devices; both within and beyond the local area network. MUD-Visualizer is made publicly available and can be found in GitHub. 

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2. Charting the Attack Surface of Trigger-Action IoT Platforms

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3319535.3345662  

   Wang, Qi ; Datta, Pubali ; Yang, Wei ; Liu, Si ; Bates, Adam ; Gunter, Carl A. ( November 2019 , 2019 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security)

   Internet of Things (IoT) deployments are becoming increasingly automated and vastly more complex. Facilitated by programming abstractions such as trigger-action rules, end-users can now easily create new functionalities by interconnecting their devices and other online services. However, when multiple rules are simultaneously enabled, complex system behaviors arise that are difficult to understand or diagnose. While history tells us that such conditions are ripe for exploitation, at present the security states of trigger-action IoT deployments are largely unknown. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of the interactions between trigger-action rules in order to identify their security risks. Using IFTTT as an exemplar platform, we first enumerate the space of inter-rule vulnerabilities that exist within trigger-action platforms. To aid users in the identification of these dangers, we go on to present iRuler, a system that performs Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solving and model checking to discover inter-rule vulnerabilities within IoT deployments. iRuler operates over an abstracted information flow model that represents the attack surface of an IoT deployment, but we discover in practice that such models are difficult to obtain given the closed nature of IoT platforms. To address this, we develop methods that assist in inferring trigger-action information flows based on Natural Language Processing. We develop a novel evaluative methodology for approximating plausible real-world IoT deployments based on the installation counts of 315,393 IFTTT applets, determining that 66% of the synthetic deployments in the IFTTT ecosystem exhibit the potential for inter-rule vulnerabilities. Combined, these efforts provide the insight into the real-world dangers of IoT deployment misconfigurations. 

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3. Securing Internet of Things Devices Using the Network Context

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TII.2019.2954100  

   Trnka, Michal ; Svacina, Jan ; Cerny, Tomas ; Song, Eunjee ; Hong, Jiman ; Bures, Miroslav ( November 2019 , IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics)

   Internet of Things (IoT) devices have been widely adopted in recent years. Unlike conventional information systems, IoT solutions have greater access to real-world contextual data and are typically deployed in an environment that cannot be fully controlled, and these circumstances create new challenges and opportunities. In this article, we leverage the knowledge that an IoT device has about its network context to provide an additional security factor. The device periodically scans a network and reports a list of all devices in the network. The server analyzes movements in the network and subsequently reacts to suspicious events. This article describes how our method can detect network changes, retrieved only from scanning devices in the network. To demonstrate the proposed solution, we perform a multi-week case study on a network with hundreds of active devices and confirm that our method can detect network anomalies or changes. 

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4. Fear and Logging in the Internet of Things

   Wang, Qi ; Hassan, Wajih Ul ; Bates, Adam ; Gunter, Carl ( February 2018 , Network and Distributed Systems Symposium)

   As the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to proliferate, diagnosing incorrect behavior within increasingly-automated homes becomes considerably more difficult. Devices and apps may be chained together in long sequences of trigger-action rules to the point that from an observable symptom (e.g., an unlocked door) it may be impossible to identify the distantly removed root cause (e.g., a malicious app). This is because, at present, IoT audit logs are siloed on individual devices, and hence cannot be used to reconstruct the causal relationships of complex workflows. In this work, we present ProvThings, a platform-centric approach to centralized auditing in the Internet of Things. ProvThings performs efficient automated instrumentation of IoT apps and device APIs in order to generate data provenance that provides a holistic explanation of system activities, including malicious behaviors. We prototype ProvThings for the Samsung SmartThings platform, and benchmark the efficacy of our approach against a corpus of 26 IoT attacks. Through the introduction of a selective code instrumentation optimization, we demonstrate in evaluation that ProvThings imposes just 5% overhead on physical IoT devices while enabling real time querying of system behaviors, and further consider how ProvThings can be leveraged to meet the needs of a variety of stakeholders in the IoT ecosystem. 

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5. Generating Stateful Policies for IoT Device Security with Cross-Device Sensors

   https://doi.org/10.1109/NoF55974.2022.9942547  

   Chuluundorj, Zorigtbaatar ; Liu, Shuwen ; Shue, Craig A. ( October 2022 , International Conference on Network of the Future (NoF))

   The security of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices in the residential environment is important due to their widespread presence in homes and their sensing and actuation capabilities. However, securing IoT devices is challenging due to their varied designs, deployment longevity, multiple manufacturers, and potentially limited availability of long-term firmware updates. Attackers have exploited this complexity by specifically targeting IoT devices, with some recent high-profile cases affecting millions of devices. In this work, we explore access control mechanisms that tightly constrain access to devices at the residential router, with the goal of precluding access that is inconsistent with legitimate users' goals. Since many residential IoT devices are controlled via applications on smartphones, we combine application sensors on phones with sensors at residential routers to analyze workflows. We construct stateful filters at residential routers that can require user actions within a registered smartphone to enable network access to an IoT device. In doing so, we constrain network packets only to those that are consistent with the user's actions. In our experiments, we successfully identified 100% of malicious traffic while correctly allowing more than 98% of legitimate network traffic. The approach works across device types and manufacturers with straightforward API and state machine construction for each new device workflow. 

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